Posts Tagged ‘Themes’.

If I were to ask you what the least used default page type in WordPress is, chances are you’d say the archive template. Or, more likely, you’d probably not even think of the archive template at all — that’s how unpopular it is. The reason is simple. As great as WordPress is, the standard way in which it approaches the archive is far from user-friendly.

Let’s fix that today! Let’s build an archive page for WordPress that’s actually useful. The best part is that you will be able to use it with any modern WordPress theme installed on your website at the moment.

Economists have taught us that a lot of choice is not always a good thing. Having many options can lead to “analysis paralysis” and a feeling of being overwhelmed, due to the increased effort required and the level of uncertainty in making the right choice.

With a nearly unlimited pool of WordPress themes to choose from, it becomes so easy to feel overwhelmed and resort to inaction or choosing a low-quality theme. In cases where you have a lot of options, it pays to know exactly what you need. [Content Care Nov/02/2016]

Whether you offer free or premium themes, testing should be a major part of your development process. By planning in advance, you can foster a development environment that deters some bugs by design and that helps you prevent others.

The aim of this article is to share some of the tricks I use personally during and after development to achieve a bug-free product. This article is split into three distinct sections Setting up, Development phase and Final testing. This should give you a good overview of what you can do over the course of the development cycle.

Now powering over 17% of the Web, WordPress is increasingly becoming the content management system (CMS) of choice for the average user. But what about websites built with an outdated CMS or without a CMS at all? Does moving to WordPress mean starting over and losing all the time, energy and money put into the current website? Nope!

Migrating a website (including the design) over to WordPress is actually easier than you might think. In this guide, we’ll outline the migration process and work through the steps with a sample project. We’ll also cover some of the challenges you might encounter and review the solutions.

In case you missed it, WordPress release 3.4 included a very exciting new development - the theme customizer. This allows users to tweak theme settings using a WYSIWYG interface and customise a theme so it includes the colours, fonts, text and pretty much anything else they want.

The purists out there may be throwing their hands up in horror - a WYSIWYG interface! Letting users alter themes themselves! Surely that opens the floodgates for the creation of thousands of ugly, messy WordPress sites?

There is so much to learn about WordPress theme development. The Internet is home to hundreds of articles about building WordPress themes, to countless theme frameworks that will help you get started, and to endless WordPress themes, some of which are beautiful and professional but not a few of which are (to be honest) a bit crappy.

Rather than write another article on building a WordPress theme (which would be silly, really, since any theme I build would fall into the “crappy” category), I’ve asked some of the top theme designers and developers to share some tips and techniques to help you improve and refine your theme development and design process.

There has quite probably never been a better time to be a premium theme user. While a huge increase in the supply of quality premium themes hasn’t particularly driven down prices, it has promoted a huge push for innovation, best practices and quality design. Unfortunately, there’s one crucial thing which rarely gets quite so much attention as the must have responsive design: after-sales support.

Sadly, all too often, documentation is seriously lacking, and getting a reply on the developer’s support forum or via email takes much longer than it should. This post aims to take the pain out of using a premium WordPress theme by sharing some tips I’ve learned in my time as a “support expert” for a major theme shop.

Today we are pleased to release Frank, an open-source WordPress theme designed and built to provide a light, responsive and unobtrusive reading experience. The theme's default home page makes 9 database queries and consists of 2 requests weighing at roughly 30KB (9.5KB gzipped). Frank keeps it basic: no Javascript dependence, no unnecessary images, just a simple, no-frills, fast blog theme. The theme is introduced by its developer, P.J. Onori. —Ed.

Frank is a responsive WordPress theme. It uses a modified version of the Foundation grid system. It also offers the unique feature of a modular home page layout system. The theme comes with various different layouts for your home page (1 column, 2 column, 3 column, 4 column, etc.) that can be mixed and matched. This allows for a home page with different content sections in different layouts.

If you've been around WordPress for a while you know how difficult it used to be to create post lists based on complex criteria while also conforming to WordPress standards. Over the course of a few years the platform has come a long way. By utilising the power of the WP_Query class, we can lists posts in any way we want.

The WP_Query class is one of the most important parts of the WordPress codebase. Among other things, it determines the query you need on any given page and pulls posts accordingly.

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